Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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901. “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

— Ernest Hemingway

902. “Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.”

— Ernest Hemingway

903. “A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.”

— Ernest Hemingway

904. “It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.”

— Ernest Hemingway

905. “I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”

— Ernest Hemingway

906. “I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”

— Ernest Hemingway

907. “And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

908. “Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

909. “Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.”

— Ernest Hemingway

910. “As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.”

— Ernest Hemingway

911. “Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Featured in: Country Quotes

912. “He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”

— Ernest Hemingway

913. “In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.”

— Ernest Hemingway

914. “People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”

— Ernest Hemingway

915. “If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

— Ernest Hemingway

916. “The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

917. “Shooting gives me a good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”

— Ernest Hemingway

918. “If you’re looking for messages, try Western Union.”

— Ernest Hemingway

919. “It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”

— Ernest Hemingway

920. “When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

— Ernest Hemingway

921. “The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.”

— Ernest Hemingway

922. “Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.”

— Ernest Hemingway

923. “I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.”

— Ernest Hemingway

924. “My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.”

— Ernest Hemingway

925. “You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”

— Ernest Hemingway

926. “I felt very lonely when they were all there.”

— Ernest Hemingway

927. “It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

928. “Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”

— Ernest Hemingway

929. “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

930. “I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”

— Ernest Hemingway

931. “He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”

— Ernest Hemingway

932. “That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway

933. “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

— Ernest Hemingway

934. “I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.”

— Ernest Hemingway

935. “It’s a town you come to for a short time.”

— Ernest Hemingway

936. “Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?”

— Ernest Hemingway

937. “We wait always for something that does not come.”

— Ernest Hemingway

938. “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

— Ernest Hemingway

939. “Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”

— Ernest Hemingway

940. “No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”

— Ernest Hemingway

941. “They arrested us after breakfast.”

— Ernest Hemingway

942. “There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”

— Ernest Hemingway

943. “Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”

— Ernest Hemingway

944. “He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”

— Ernest Hemingway

945. “A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”

— Ernest Hemingway

946. “Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.”

— Ernest Hemingway

947. “Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Featured in: Book Quotes

948. “I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

949. “Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.”

— Ernest Hemingway

950. “I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”

— Ernest Hemingway